Family team serving up Lunch
A Palmerston North mother and daughter team want to have their lunch and let you eat it too.
Sandy Hight and her daughter Jo Stephens started a lunch delivery service, simply called Lunch Ltd, for busy office workers looking for a healthy, home-made meal.
And it is now looking to serve Lunch to a wider audience, after building from a soft-launch among family and friends.
The ingredients for Lunch came together a little over a year ago, when a frazzled Hight decided she was done pulling 60 hour weeks working in insurance.
Hight said her workload left her feeling burnt out and she was sick of it.
‘‘I thought if I’m going to work this hard for someone else, why not do it for myself.’’
Stephens was starting to feel the same about her job, and both mother and daughter were looking for more flexibility and control over their hours, so they decided to start Lunch.
Hight always struggled to find
time to get a bite to eat. While at Stephens’ job, she had a 30-minute lunchbreak, which made it harder to chose healthy options over quick and convenient ones.
They figured there was a demand for a business that would simply bring you a healthy, filling lunch. Other cities had similar businesses, but Palmerston North didn’t.
Around the same time, the tenant of a Broadway Ave flat Hight owned moved out. So, Hight convert the flat into a full commercial kitchen for Lunch – knocking out the wall between the kitchen and living area, and using the bedrooms as storage spaces.
Hight said it was the ideal solution, because if she’d run the business from her home she’d never stop working, and getting balance in her life was the reason Hight struck out to start Lunch in the first place. They decided to start small and find what would and wouldn’t work by making lunches for friends, former co-workers and their husbands’ colleagues.
Then, as word of mouth spread, more people started signing on for Lunch and new opportunities opened up. The pair started catering meetings and morning teas for the workplaces of their original customers, leading up to catering an 89-person conference.